Every day, I watch my mother grow weaker, and it feels as though time is slowly taking her away while I stand here powerless.
The doctors have told us that her treatment can no longer be delayed and that she needs it urgently.
I am begging you from the bottom of my heart—if there is compassion in your heart, please don't leave us to face this alone.
Help us get my mother the treatment she desperately needs before it is too late.
Even the smallest donation can make a real difference, and even sharing this appeal could reach someone who is able to save my mother's life. Please, don't scroll past our plea in silence.
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Help My Mother Get Urgent Medical Treatment Abroad
Please donate to this family if you have any means to. They're in an incredibly dire situation, and if this money doesn't get raised as soon as possible, that situation is only going to get worse. Don't feel bad if you can only give a small amount or don't have any spare money, everyone's situation is different, just do as much as you individually can and it will make a difference. Reblogging with tags and sharing this with others will make a good impact as well, the more people this reaches the more people there are helping.
I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
Help Walid’s Family Find Safety and Stability After Repeated Displacement in Gaza
I am Engineer Walid Al-Qatrawi. I am 36 years old, a father of three children: Adam, Hala, and Nay. I was born and raised in Gaza, where my family and I have spent our entire lives.
Because of the ongoing conflict, we have been forced to leave our home and relocate multiple times in search of safety. Today, my family and I are displaced in southern Gaza, living in a fragile tent that does not provide the protection and stability my children need.
After repeated displacement, my children have lost the sense of security and normal life they once knew. Every day, we struggle to provide them with a safe and dignified environment. Our tent offers very limited protection from harsh conditions and the challenges of displacement. We urgently need to repair and equip it, build a private bathroom for our family, provide food, clean water, clothing, and essential supplies for our children. If possible, we also hope to secure a safer temporary home where our family can live with more stability.
Every donation, no matter how small, can make a real difference. If you cannot donate, sharing our story may help us reach someone who can.
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Hello beautiful people around!
This is Mohamed Saraf, from London, UK. Today I'm representing o… Mohamed Tarek needs your support for H
36 & £2,000
Thank you for reading our story and for standing with my family during this difficult time.
critically stagnant spotlight campaigns for today (7/16.)
all campaigns are vetted by the organizers of gaza funds. this site has been vouched for by palestinian bloggers. for full transparency, a list of campaigns is available to view on their site. additionally, if you look at my list of individual campaigns, you will see that i personally trust these campaigns and have donated to them many times.
karem al-kahlout: 17 days since last donation
bessan khalaf: 15 days since last donation
dr. isam: 15 days since last donation
nada muhaisen: 12 days since last donation
basim and hla: 12 days since last donation
yasmin's family: 9 days since last donation
yahia hawajry: 9 days since last donation
ghazi mekawi: 8 days since last donation
hassan abdullah: 8 days since last donation
individual posts for these campaigns are generally ignored, which is why i've moved to using this pinned post instead. it simply takes me too long to queue up a bunch of posts people will just scroll past. please don’t ignore this, you have the opportunity to throw someone a lifeline and do some real good. even if you don’t have any money, a reblog is free and can help get more eyes on these campaigns. none of them are on tumblr, to my knowledge. nobody sees these campaigns unless people reblog posts about them or make their own posts.
thank you in advance for your consideration.
tags for reach under the cut (you can always let me know if you'd rather not be on this list, or if you want to be added to the list!)
I never imagined I would have to ask for help like this, but today I have no other choice.
My fundraising campaign has been closed, and I urgently need **$500** for kidney stone surgery. Without this operation, I continue to suffer from severe pain.
I am a mother of three young children. I am also living with a skull fracture, and my family and I are currently living in a tent under extremely difficult conditions.
Any donation, no matter how small, can make a real difference and bring me one step closer to getting the medical care I desperately need.
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If you are unable to donate, please consider sharing my message. Your kindness, support, and prayers mean more than words can express.
Subject: Collecting money for my mother's operation in her back
Current process:
USD 2,751 / $3,563
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I am raising funds to support my elderly parents who are currently living in extremely difficult condition… Mohammed H needs your support f
💔 My Mother’s Life Depends on Your Kindness
My mother is in Gaza, where every day is a struggle to survive. Some time ago, she was injured when shrapnel from nearby shelling struck her back. She tried to endure the pain for as long as she could, but her condition has become much worse.
Today, my mother is in critical condition. She suffers from unbearable back pain, extreme exhaustion, and her suffering is increasing with every passing day.
After examining her, the doctors told us that she urgently needs emergency back surgery. They warned us that delaying the operation could lead to serious complications and further deterioration of her condition.
The cost of this life-saving surgery is $1,000.
Thanks to the kindness of generous people, we have managed to raise only $188 so far. While we are deeply grateful for every donation, we still need $812 to reach the goal.
For my family, trapped in the devastating conditions in Gaza, raising this amount alone is simply impossible. Every day we wait means more pain for my mother and more fear that her condition will become irreversible.
Iam begging you from the bottom of my heart: please help us save my mother.
Every donation no matter how small brings us closer to giving her the urgent surgery she desperately needs. And if you cannot donate, please share this post with your friends and family. Your share could reach someone who is able to help.
Please don’t let my mother’s pain continue because we couldn’t raise the remaining $812 in time.
Thank you for your kindness, your prayers, and your compassion. ❤️🙏
THESE MAY BE MY LAST WORDS ABOUT MY WIFE.
This could be the last time I write anything while my wife is still alive, and I will never forgive anyone who sees this and scrolls past without caring or even sharing.
Today, my wife's medicine ran out. Since leaving the intensive care unit, her condition has remained critical, and without her treatment, I fear she could stop breathing again. I have no way to afford the medication she urgently needs.
I am begging you from Gaza, watching the woman I love struggle for every breath while I stand helpless beside her. Please donate now and help me get her treatment before it's too late.
Please donate now. GoFundMe.
The unbearable conditions we are living through in Gaza are slowly breaking me, and I have no strength left.
At the same time, my father is in critical condition and needs daily medication that we can no longer afford. Every day without treatment puts his life at serious risk.
We are living through something beyond our ability to endure.
If you’re reading this, please don’t scroll away. Your help could save my father’s life.
Please support us and share our story 🙏💔
📌 Fundraiser vetted (#167 by el-shab-hussein & nabulsi), But we created a new GoFundMe page because GoFundMe suspended the beneficiary’s account on the platform, which put us in a very difficult situation.
everyone's favourite sheep-stealing plucky dragonrider, the wonderful nettles, by the even more wonderful @ellemnopie!!! she's gone from our screens but not from our hearts <3
Taj is only 18 months old, but her story is extraordinary. While she was still in her mother’s womb, her mother suffered a severe head injury and a skull fracture during the war in Gaza. Doctors feared for the mother’s life and believed the pregnancy could not continue safely.
But Taj survived. She was born on September 28, 2024, against all odds — a true miracle.
Today, Taj lives with her injured mother, her father, and her two brothers in a worn-out tent after their home was destroyed. Instead of a safe nursery, she grows up surrounded by displacement, fear, and poverty.
Taj is suffering from malnutrition and urgently needs milk, diapers, nutritious food, clean water, and basic daily necessities. Her mother is still struggling with the effects of her head injury and needs ongoing medical care as well.
To keep Taj fed and cared for, the family needs at least $50 every day.
Please help this miracle child survive. Every donation, no matter how small, gives Taj a chance to grow, stay healthy, and have the childhood every child deserves. If you cannot donate, sharing her story could help save her life.
I am Veronica Salber, a friend of baby taj from Gaza. I created this campaign to ensure that donations reach her safely and with full transp
